The Lambertville record. [volume] (Lambertville, N.J.) 1872-1968, 1887-04-13

reer VIII not easily DtCkou any StIOHS
citizen forth.
He will look with the eye of RETROSPECT
ton and fancy upon his home, and dream
of time when he shall come back to it,
to impart to it the memorial of his dis
tinction and deeds. But, having played
his part, posterity will no more guard his
environment than it will preserve some
theatre ON whose stage great actor like
Shakespeare or Garrick played
MADISON AND THE ADAMsEs.
Montpelier, Mr. Madison's house, which
he brought into extensive form after he
had been President, was an unsolicited
place when l saw it ten years ago, with
an alien inhabiting its 1900 acres, who
had only one domestic servant, and he,
too, worried me to find him purchaser,
so that he could go off somewhere and be
lost in the midst of large city.
From survey of all the Presidents, |
am rather of the opinion that the most
successful of them were the two Adamses
and the recent President Hayes; for these
have retained their houses in the family,
and they gave to domestic life enough
attention TO compensate them for the in
evitable disappointment of public life.
There are no two such household relics
in the United States as the plain, ugly,
semi-farmhouses where the father and
son of the Adams family were born, at
old Quincy, near Boston.
The later house of President Adams
the first has been kept up by descend
ants, who have uniformly prospered
either through intermarriages or careful
quest of business in the neighboring
great city.
HAYES
Mr.. Hayes, in spite of much trivial sa-
tire, has survived all the ex-Presidents
and has a secure solace in his own fam.
lily, which he has always thought more Of
than public station. went to see. him
while he was President, and found his
agreeable but modest brick house stand
ing in NATURAL wood at the edge of the
town of Fremont town so new that
the public man might almost as we'll be
in Germany as expect there to be much
troubled with social attentions. Many OF
the inhabitants are Germans, and the
railroad running through the place gives
easy access to Philadelphia or Cleveland
or Columbus, so that it is real and not
false retirement.
Mr.. Hayes was never saying, when
President, like Jefferson and Washing.
ton, that he longed for his home, but he
gets more real satisfaction out of 1t than
If he had received more applause; while
his administration will be judged, in the
general history of the country, not for
what people now say of it, but merely
for the acts which were contaminated In
its little span.
SHAKESPEARE AND BYRON.
l have said that the same lesson Is
taught by the noted homes of foreign
lands. What preserves the dubious relics
OF Shakespeare, at Stratford, is the con-
tinuous activity of Shakspeare's compo-
sitions, played in all English-speaking
lands and read as trophies of style and
of intellectual perfection.
Some few persons, comparatively, go
to the house Of Walter Scott after they
nave ransacked the picturesque parts of
Scotland. Pilgrims go with even more
ardor to the cottage of Burns whose
songs and satires have come to genera
ton which appreciates them more than
his own, because of their democratic
spirit and fidelity.
A few years past / drove out from
property of Newstead Abbey, but /
judged, by the travellers record on the
premises, that | was one of the few who
would take the pains to explore the spot
on which the poet lavished so much Inn
agination and melancholy.
He evidently believed that 1t would be-
come shrine, for he had buried his dog
near at hand upon the lawn, under a
monument imposing enough to cover
some American President A wealthy
stranger. with the landed passion of Eng
land, had bought the old place and deco
rated and embellished it; but felt, after
passing through its halls and courts, that
the true place, after all, to find Byron at
home was in his books, which one can
have on shipboard or at lonely mines and
ranches, or in the crowded loneliness of
towns and cities. y
Career is at the expense of. locality,
and so it will ever be.
Those who worship personal shrines
are the yirtuous and solvent descendants
of men who never heard the trump of
fame, but passed their lives within fixed
precincts, and hedged their competence
ABOUT with private safeguards, and bred
in their posterity the tender affections of
pAff"eS pSoSts
ALBERT GALLATIN.
| visited, last autumn, the room where
Albert Gallatin died, in little neglected
suburb of the city of New York. What
was there to show me the profound study
of finance he gave to the problems of
revenue and taxationP Nothing; and
still less in the poor old bald and
whitened head he dragged to his bed to
pay the debt of nature.
The life had gone out of him at the
public task followed in his dingy public
offices, traced in worn books of law and
figures, and pondered over in unpremed-
itated walks, where he saw not the nature
that beckoned to him in blossom and
brook and flowing tides of rivers or of
men.
AS the sea writes not the career of
ships, the earth holds not the giant foot
prints of the men of long endeavor.
GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.
The Rauuieftaa fur :. 1<.,1...w.o